Guerrilla Mail has increased capacity to 4x with the installation of a new server! One of the greatest features of this server is an SSD drive.

Guerrilla Mail’s software stack has been evolving too. Incoming emails are now stored in memory using Redis instead of going to disk – removing the biggest bottleneck. A Memcached server is also used for caching some requests. These improvements all help with speeding up Guerrilla Mail.

Some data needs to be persistent. This is where the SSD comes in handy – when its time to backup the data that’s in RAM, this can be done in a flash! Also, not all of the data can fit in RAM, especially the data for the file transfer feature.

Another important improvement was the addition of SSL encryption to our email server. Did you know that email on the internet usually travels between server to server without encryption? Email is really analogous to post-cards sent via snail-mail. When servers talk to each other to deliver your email, they can optionally negotiate a TLS connection, but it’s not required. Guerrilla Mail’s server now makes it possible to negotiate a TLS connection to ensure that email transfers get encrypted as desired by the sending server.

It’s also quite surprising to see our SMTP server that’s guzzling down all the email is working so well. What’s so surprising? Well, it’s written in PHP. The performance has been quite adequate. It barley goes over 5% CPU, even with thousands of connections open and hundreds of emails per second. The source code has been released here https://github.com/flashmob/Guerrilla-SMTPd

Although in the near future, Guerrilla Mail’s SMTP server will be switching to the Go programming language. A new project has been already started https://github.com/flashmob/go-guerrilla

2012 saw a lot of new features added to Guerrilla Mail, including the Alias Address, Password Manager, Email Sending, File Transfer and other smaller features. The site also added 4 new language translations.

Guerrilla Mail is looking forward to next year with more improvements and new features! We wish you a Happy New Year and see you next year!